11 The heart force #2
“But Eliri is a prodigy, too, and have you heard about what she’s done?” Iriset says it quickly, passionately, also in mirané.
“Have you?” the Moon-Eater asks slyly, glancing over at Eliri.
“Old Sarenpet,” Iriset says, “so Eliri can follow. Eliri, her is for women-gendered others. Is that how you would describe that, Shade?”
The Moon-Eater shrugs. “Sure. Now prove Iriset can sunder.”
The numen snarls.
Iriset touches its long-fingered hand. “First explain what exactly sundering is, and why I can do it but you cannot. You can do things I never could.”
“Never has said what sundering is, Iriset mé Isidor,” the numen says through its sharp teeth.
“Say it again,” she insists on Eliri’s behalf.
It seethes but says, “Sundering creates a force different from the four known forces—a fifth force, a force of creative power.”
“Power means the same as force in this tongue,” Eliri says, and Iriset laughs.
“The force force,” she says, sharing her laughter with Eliri—though the Adept Hand only smiles slightly.
The numen shoves everything off the desk between Iriset and Eliri, eliciting exclamations. It says, “Be serious. Iriset knows the fifth force, Iriset saw in the temple, and felt it.”
She sobers. “I did. It was immense but somehow incredibly small. All the power I’ve ever felt contained in the palm of a hand.
” Iriset bites her lip, thinking of the Moon-Eater’s Mistress, and the first time Iriset felt hints of sundering.
When Amaranth brings herself to pleasure and it opens and shuts something in the Moon-Eater’s Temple.
At the time, Iriset did not have a clue what it was other than sex magic and the remnants of an old red god.
She thought of it as love. Now she knows it was a prison.
“Call it the heart force,” she says quietly.
“Oh,” says the Moon-Eater. “I like it.”
The numen purses its lips.
Eliri says, “Unscientific.”
“So sundering creates the heart force,” Iriset says, blowing past the commentary. “But what makes me able to do it? I’m not like a numen. I can’t shape-shift. I require tools and arrays.”
The Moon-Eater wanders to Eliri’s shelf of cubbies to skim his mirané-brown fingers against sheaves of papers. “Never says sunderers cannot be bound by the known rules of design, but can be true gods, because the potential power is limitless.”
“Iriset is not a god,” Iriset says carefully.
“Not yet,” the numen whispers. It stares at her with pink-shard eyes, seeing through her skin.
“There is no answer to satisfy Iriset. Greater minds have tried, written and argued in languages Iriset has never heard of. Never has searched. Never has learned. There is no one in the world that knows what makes a sunderer. Only that sunderers exist, that others have existed. What is known is that numena are born in sundering, of sundering. We are made of the fifth force and can change ourselves. We are always in motion. Iriset is made of four forces but can access the fifth. Bring it to life, make numena. Make anything. You, Iriset Sunderer—if you master sundering, you can change everything.”
In the Moon-Eater’s Temple four hundred years in the future, the numen and Iriset made a sixteen-point diamond to highlight the threads of force at work binding the Moon-Eater to the center of the empire’s Holy Design in order for Iriset to see and understand them.
So here they do the same, and settle a simple chunk of polished opal in the center.
To see if Iriset can find the means within herself to see its inner design, to see the ways to pull it apart.
Iriset sits cross-legged at the ecstatic anchor and puts both hands to the array.
She’s stripped down to loincloth, wet lips and breath and her own inner design.
The design diamond immediately causes Iriset to relax, though she hadn’t realized how tense she’d held herself against the chaotic force patterns in this place. She’s too used to the consistent balance of Aharté’s Holy Design.
“Not seeing,” the numen says, “but knowing. Understanding. Use eyes and ears and, yes, that skin, but don’t rely on such flawed flesh.”
Recalling what it felt like when the numen triggered this rivation in her, she tips forward, a little bit physically but a lot sensorily.
The highlighter array lets her trace the complex forces in her mind until the opal’s design expands in her awareness, the mineral-flow structure, the hardened flow-force dominance of its chemistry, and Iriset laughs breathily as she realizes with the right tools she could prick here, pull there, and transform it into salt.
Or, with an infusion of some base elements, obsidian.
She opens her eyes to excitedly explain, and the numen says, “A sunderer doesn’t need tools other than will and understanding. A sunderer can pluck those missing elements from the heart force, make them yourself, and then there should be a chunk of obsidian there. That is when I will be impressed.”
“Oh.” Iriset thinks fast and hard, wondering how to start the rivation process.
Before, the numen triggered it in her. But she can’t rely on it, it has been very clear.
Can she begin the process within herself, a snap of ecstatic, and transfer it to the opal?
And if she wants to make opal into obsidian, doesn’t she need to see the inner design of obsidian, too? Turning to Eliri, she asks.
“There will be obsidian here by tomorrow,” Eliri agrees.
The Moon-Eater says, “Learn something else,” assuming it to be so easy, and Iriset likes that.
They put more items in the center of the sixteen-point diamond, and Iriset studies them all.
Some are simple—gems and minerals, especially, she understands for some reason.
A feather, a strand of Eliri’s hair, a strip of silk even, ha ha ha, and Iriset gets a feel for them all.
Complex, made of so many threads of force and raw elements and various intricate designs she can’t parse yet.
Iriset thinks she could spend a year understanding the complicated essence of a bowl of tea.
The Moon-Eater crouches across from the numen, and Eliri across from Iriset in the flow quarter, all of them watching, conversing, asking questions of what Iriset sees.
“It doesn’t matter what Iriset sees,” the numen says.
“Eliri can see. Can understand. Sundering is inside Iriset. Not study, not understanding. Iriset does it.”
“I need to understand how before I can just do it!” she snaps.
“It has been hours,” Eliri says. “Perhaps a break.”
Iriset gratefully realizes the draining falling force that bows her back, the click of ecstatic in her burning eyes. Yes, she needs a break.
“First,” says the Moon-Eater, “one last study.” He gets up and picks his careful way into the design diamond. With a flourish of hands, he poses in the center. “Me!”
The numen tilts its head thoughtfully, and Eliri says, “Much more complex specimen.”
“Not necessarily,” Iriset says, teasing out of habit, even as she leans in toward the star array, putting her hands on the ecstatic anchor.
The Moon-Eater laughs and Iriset closes her eyes, diving back through into the stretch and pull of forces.
Her heart beats steadily, her breath scours her throat, her nose, and she reaches for the center.
The Moon-Eater is fireworks, bold and brilliant, thrumming in the middle of the diamond array, his energy zipping and cracking up and down every design thread.
Iriset concentrates, tracing the array in her mind, mapping the edges and knots from every angle at once until she slides into the center of it, of him, and she knows the threads of his being the way she knew the raw opal.
The Moon-Eater is like everything and nothing, a tangle of forces that refuses to stay still.
There is no foundational design, no inner design at all, just a core.
Iriset gasps, breaking away. The fifth force churning there. A tiny galaxy of power.
(No wonder generations of the Vertex Seal could never kill the numen.)
Iriset leans back on her hands, head lolled back, heaving deep breaths.
There’s no way she can create something like that.
Iriset can imagine transforming an opal into obsidian, or sand into diamonds, or a cat’s fur into scales.
A bowl of tea into wine. This Moon-Eater’s core is nothing like those things.
But there is one thing it reminds her of: the entire empire.
The Holy Syr unraveled the Moon-Eater into such thin existence and bound him to Holy Design itself—she gave him an inner design based on the rising and falling forces of the stagnant moon, the ecstatic spark of orgasm, the flow of blood from the Vertex Seal.
Every year the miran reinforced the connection between the Moon-Eater, the Holy Design, and the mirané people during the ritual of the Vertex Eclipse.
The Moon-Eater became—becomes?—the Holy Design itself. She understands. Iriset knows.
Suddenly the weight of gravity ceases: She’s being held by arms and body against her spine, her hips, shoulders behind her shoulders, a face against her face. The numen whispers, “I have you.”
“Was I the one who did it,” she whispers back.
“Not if I can help it,” the numen says, full of grief.